Little Boots

Paris Gourtsoyannis
Sunday 08 March 2009, The Journal Issue 20

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Despite being too young to ever have bought an album on tape, it is nonetheless unsettling for me that Victoria Hesketh, aka Little Boots, should have been voted Sound of 2009 by BBC Radio 1 listeners and appeared on Later with Jools Holland on the back of a handful of—admittedly talented and entertaining—YouTube performances. A cynic would assume she had an excellent publicist; however, as anyone in the crowd as she headlined at Sick Note @ Cab Vol’s third birthday would conclude, hype has little to do with it –  and as the saying goes, you can take the girl out of the north, but you can’t take the north out of the girl.

Boots’ music—a fierce blend of electro-pop hooks and soaring vocals—at first appears to better reflect the gagetry rather than the artist; her sound is angular, technical and challenging, and more often than not the crowd’s attention is fixated on her Tenorion, whose baleful flashing in the centre of the stage recalls the most malevolent computers of science fiction. In contrast to all the hard edges in her music, however, Hesketh herself is all curves and very human, with a warm singing voice that is pushed hard without being overwrought.

It’s a breathless, somewhat shaky set that is poorly stage-managed and would have been in danger of failing completely were it not for the irrepressible energy that Hesketh brings. On her blog, Little Boots reveals that immediately upon finishing recording her album, she went straight into a crash-course in stage performance to be ready for her tour. Whatever this consisted of—crowd-surfing technique? Encore etiquette?—  it hasn’t altered Hesketh from the front-room phenomenon she began as.

Bouncing around the stage in a sequinned top and a little black skirt that she must have crow-barred herself into, giving it a hammer-fist as vigorous as any found at the student club night, its easy to imagine that in her mind’s eye she’s still belting out her lyrics in front of the bathroom mirror. It’s a touchingly innocent performance that’s beguiling and bemusing in equal parts. Given that her commercial success will rely on petite blonde bombshells all over the UK doing the very same as they see off their pre-drink Glens and coke, it’s an approach that should work.

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